How to clean up Bogus Bounce Rates in Google Analytics

Robert Foster·13 January 2016

I've been taking a look at the website traffic in Google Analytics lately and noticed quite a few Sources that result in a 100% Bounce Rate consistently. On further investigation it seems I'm a victim of deceptive referrer spam bots like this one.

The proposed solution is to set up a filter on your View to filter out the unwanted results, but then you need to go in and update the filter or add a new one every time you come across another spam bot. What if you could have those unwanted results filtered out based on other metrics?

So I did some playing around with the filter on my Channels Acquisition report and came up with this filter:

Include / Exclude

Metric

Qualifier

Value

Include

Bounce Rate

Less than

100

Include

Avg. Session Duration

Greater than

0

Of course, you could probably get away with just the Avg. Session Duration > 0 filter and do away with the Bounce rate altogether without it affecting your results significantly.

Apply the above filter and you'll notice a drop in the number of results, and your average bounce rate should improve and be a lot more accurate.

Once you are happy with your filter, you can create a Shortcut - effectively bookmarking it for later use.